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Sunday, April 29, 2018

“In my old age, I see that life itself is often more
fantastic and terrible than the stories we believed as children, and that
perhaps there is no harm in finding magic among the trees.”

I was pretty skeptical about this book at first. It almost
didn’t make it onto my To-Be-Read list. But am I glad it did! I ended up devouring it
in a couple of sittings. Set in Alaska during the 1920’s, the state itself is
as real as a character. I’m particularly drawn to stories like this!

Far too often, stories center on the beauty of summer and
the darkness of winter. Winter, at least in my own mind, is a dark creature to
be shunned. But this story reminds me of the beauty of it, the beauty in all
its wonder and cruelty and cold. Not many books present winter in such a way,
except maybe The Left Hand of Darkness,
and even then, it’s more cruel than beautiful.

Often times, the story left me wondering what was real and
what wasn’t. I suppose that’s a feature of magical realism, and I rather
enjoyed it. The snow child’s dialogue lacked quotation marks while everybody
else’s dialogue had them, which made me think her words were either soft spoken
or closer to thought than actual dialogue. Then there was the whole idea that
she had parents at one point, or did she really come from the first snow of
winter?

I particularly enjoyed the characters, as this was more of a
character-driven story than a plot-driven one. Mabel and Jack are such a
wonderful couple, and I loved it when they were making snow angels in their
yard with the snow child or when they danced in the kitchen. Yet they’re not
without their faults, and the character development was so well done.

Mabel’s relationship with the snow child had to be my
favorite. Having had a stillborn child years before, Mabel cares for the little
girl just as though she was her own. And the child not only inspires Mabel to
pick up drawing again and to write to her sister back East, but the child also
draws her back to the desire to live.

The Snow Child has
to be my favorite fairy tale retelling yet! It centers on the beauty and the
cruelty of nature, the enjoyment of the little things, and the joy and sorrow
of relationships. Drawn from the Russian tale of Snegurochka, the snow child,
the book actually references the original tales, and Mabel spends plenty of
time studying the pictures in an old book of her father’s, even though the text
itself is in Russian.

In all, I gave The
Snow Child 4/5 stars for wonderful storytelling and characters. I’d
recommend it to anybody who enjoys fairy tales and well-written stories and
snow. For the author’s debut, I am immensely impressed.

Doesn’t The Snow Child
sound wonderful? Have you read it already? You might also enjoy these
magical realism stories: Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter, Illusionby Frank E. Peretti, andBone Gap by
Laura Ruby.

Let’s chat! Has The Snow
Child made it to your to-be-read list yet? Anybody out there read it? Have
any magical realism book recommendations?

Sunday, April 22, 2018

For those who may not know, I grew up within a military
community. This lifestyle not only means that I’m not very familiar with
civilian culture (I thought everybody knew what a commissary was), but it also
means I’ve had to move around a lot. I’ve never lived in the same house for
more than three years in a row. The longest I ever lived in one state was seven
years, and that was in four different houses.

Let that sink in before you ask me where I’m from.

Person: So, where are you from?

Me: Would you like the list alphabetically or
chronologically?

I’m not from anywhere.
Not really. I’m from the States, sure, but what do you do with the years I’ve
lived in England, Italy, and Germany?

Identity crisis aside, I’ve moved around a lot. Which also
means I’ve gotten the opportunity to travel, and I enjoy it. Traveling is
amazing. I like getting out of my comfort zone and setting foot in a strange
wildness, discovering new types of ravines, languages, and peoples. That should
be incredibly inspirational for writing. Right?

When I first moved to England, I bought a used bike. I could
walk everywhere, sure. I walked from my flat to the castle downtown, but it
took an hour there and an hour back. With a bike, it took half the time (it was
uphill, okay?). Chatting with my aunt online, she remarked that it must be
wonderfully inspirational living in a foreign country and the city that birthed
the legend of Robin Hood.

Of course it was inspirational. So I sat down, and typed,
and!—I wrote a poem about a puddle on a sidewalk that I passed while biking.
Not too inspiring, is it? (For those of you who are curious, it was my first
local publication, in my university’s magazine. Check out: Puddle.)

A year or so before I moved to England, I went with a class
from my undergraduate university on a study abroad trip to Oxford (read all
about it in my newsletter: The Two Fandoms).
When I take short trips, whether it’s for a weekend or a week, I like to leave
my computer behind to focus on the trip itself. But while I was in Oxford, I
was also getting a piece published on Splickety’s Lightning Blog, and
they wanted me to make some edits. Which is pretty hard to do without a computer. In the end, I
messaged my mom and walked her through the edits (all three rounds of them).
Lesson learned—if I submit a piece for publication, even if I don’t know
whether it’s been accepted or not yet, bring
the computer.

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only
one page.”

—St. Augustine of Hippo

When you travel as much as I do, you run the risk of
computer damage. One time my sister and I had our backpacks in the back of a
rental car, and the driver opened the trunk without watching the bags, and they
fell and damaged both our computers. A piece of advice for travelers—whenever
you go somewhere, only take what you’re not afraid to lose.

Another time, for my first two experiences of National Novel
Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), we happened to be packing up our household goods and
moving to a new country. It’s a little difficult to write a novel to the
pterodactyl screech of packing tape.

Leisurely travel can also be so overwhelming that I get
behind on journaling. I didn’t journal half of 2017 because I didn’t want to
skip over my trip to Israel, but I only got halfway through writing about it. I
like to write incredibly detailed journal entries, so I couldn’t keep up with
them while I was in Israel. I finally finished my journal entry back home on
New Year’s Eve.

It’s especially hard to share a blog post, even if I have it
scheduled ahead of time, if I have no internet access.

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door […] You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

—Bilbo Baggins, The Lord of the Rings

But that isn’t to say that all writing-and-travel-related
experiences are negative. Some of them can be inspirational. Hiking and biking,
in particular, are most inspirational for me. The exercise gets my blood
pumping and my mind running. For example, I came up with novel names while
hiking in the Alps from Oberammergau to Ettal. I also came up with countless
poems from exploring cathedrals or biking to my local library. I even came up
with the initial idea for Last of the Memory Keepers when we got
pickpocketed in Rome.

And because I travel so much, I can write practically
anywhere. While I prefer my desk, I can and have written in airports, in cafes,
in the car, on trains, and yes, in my head while exercising.

So yes, I would say traveling can serve as an inspiration
for writing. Traveling provides me with new life experiences and gives me
stories, fictional and nonfictional to write about. Sometimes, it poses
challenges. But that’s part of the adventure.

Let’s chat! What’s your favorite place to write? Is
traveling beneficial or disastrous for your writing? Where have you found
inspiration?

Sunday, April 15, 2018

Last year, I read a lot of books to be sure. 109 to be
exact. In all of those stories, I discovered a new favorite form: novels in
verse.

What is a novel in verse, you might ask? For those of you
unfamiliar with this form, it’s basically a novel written as a series of poems.
The form is kind of like Paradise Lost
or Beowulf, but not really. While
classics like the ones mentioned tend to use formal poetry-form, novels in
verse tend to use free verse. Also, the latter novels tend to be more
introspective than your average novel.

Because I’m a fan of poetry, here’s just a couple of reasons
why I enjoy novels in verse* and why others might enjoy them as well!

*For clarity, I will also refer to novels in verse as lyrical
novels, not in the sense that they’re sing-songy but rather that they’re
poetic. I’ll use the terms interchangeably to avoid overusing one term alone.

1)Poetry!

“Our liveswill twist and twist,intermingling the old and the newuntil it doesn’t matterwhich is which.”—Hà, Inside Out &
Back Again

I didn’t discover my passion for poetry until college, and
in some ways, I wish I had discovered it sooner, but in other ways, that’s
okay. My preferences as a teenager were weird. Books I didn’t like then, I like
now (e.g. Inkheart), and books I
liked then, I don’t care for now (e.g. Eragon).
So maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t discover poetry until college (see The Importance of Poetry: A Journey of Acceptance).

Either way, poetry can be fun to read and write. Do I want
of a whole book made up of poems with a continuous storyline? How about YES!

2)Novels
in verse are quick, easy reads.

Which makes them great for reluctant readers! Or readers
like me who are simply tired of reading 800-page novels. (Shhhh, you didn’t see me write that.) I like my dear 800-page
books, but they can be exhausting. Whereas an 800-page novel is like a long and
strenuous, albeit gorgeous hike, novels in verse are like a shot of espresso
downtown in your favorite city.

3)They’re
targeted at middle grade and young adult audiences.

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if
the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”—Madeleine L’Engle

If you haven’t already noticed, middle grade and young adult
books tend to be among my preferred books. Why, you might ask? Well, they tend
to have great themes, adventures, and characters. They continue to challenge me
as a reader, and they’re just fun to read!

Lyrical novels tend to appeal to and connect with young
audiences, presenting experiences that are relateable. Some such novels speak
about what it’s like to be a foreigner or a newcomer in a strange place and others
speak about the difficulties with school and stereotypes.

Novels in verse are great for young readers and the young at
heart!

And for those who believe adults shouldn’t read young adult
or middle grade books, I ask you to consider the words of C. S. Lewis when he
dedicated The Lion, The Witch, and the
Wardrobe to his goddaughter:

“I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not
realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too
old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older
still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”

4)Poetry
tends to use a lot of imagery, metaphors, similes, you name it.

While prose can include imagery, in poems imagery is often
symbolic. Writers can also do a lot more with metaphors and similes and sounds
than prose writers can. I could tell you that when I visited Venice in the fall
how the shade of the buildings covered me and the seagulls. Or I can show you
in verse:

“I’m in over my head in darkness, standing in shadows of the box-shaped buildings, […] with the seagulls gliding overhead, their underbellies alight against the blue, like they’re gliding on light.”—“Shadows”

Sure, I could’ve just written that the seagulls looked like
they were gliding on light in a prose piece, but it wouldn’t have had the same
effect.

5)Novels
in verse tend to be thought-provoking.

“how can I leave this
fight

flit off to college

when so many still
suffer

when I can feel tension

like mercury rising

“a wisp of hope

beginning to drift

skyward?”

—Clara, Audacity

Poetry is full of quotes I want to write down and memorize
and lines that just make me want to buy all the books and think on them again
and again. At least that’s my experience.

6)Lyrical
novels tend to evoke emotion.

There’s something about poetry that has the ability to
present and evoke emotion in a way that prose can’t.

As a writer, I use poetry as a means to express emotion in
an abstract way that prose can’t handle. Take my poem “Heartbeat” for example.
I’ve always had a hard time explaining to people why I find heartbeats
disturbing, and I don’t entirely understand it myself. So I decided to take the
emotion of fear and asked myself “What does fear feel like?” and “How do I
communicate that?” Here’s some of the result:

I took some imagery from Mt. Rainier (Washington State) and
from Mt. Saint Helens (Oregon) and used the sting of cold from glacier lakes as
a metaphor for fear. Then I stripped the poem of proper capitalization and
punctuation to add an unsettling, raw feel to the poem as a whole. My sister,
who wasn’t originally afraid of heartbeats, told me she found them disturbing
after I read her this poem. Whoops.

Of course, not all novels deal with fear. It’s only one emotion
to write about. That an author can achieve any sense of emotion for the span of
a novel is inspiring!

7)Poetry
can be downright beautiful.

“On this clear and moonless night,Mama and I wrap up in our winter clothesand go outside to watch and listen.The trees beyond our backyard form a torn-paper linebetween the snow and this skyfilled with stars.”—Mimi, Full Cicada
Moon

You had me at snow and stars. Need I say more?

Some books in prose have their fair share of moments of
beauty, but such moments tend to be more frequent in verse.

Book Recommendations!

Looking for novels in verse recommendations? Look no
further! Here are three I read and enjoyed last year: Full Cicada Moon by Marilyn Hilton (5/5 stars), Inside Out & Back Again by Thanhha
Lai (4/5 stars), and Saving Red by Sonya
Sones (4/5 stars). And one I read this year: Audacityby Melanie Crowder (4/5 stars).

Back in February, I attended WriteOnCon, an amazing online
writing conference, and one of the live panels featured a bunch of authors who
write novels in verse talking about their books and some of their favorite
lyrical novels. I’m pretty sure I added at least ten novels to my to-be-read
list.

Though I haven’t read them all yet, here are just a few: The Way the Light Bends by Jensen
Cordelia, Heartbeat by Sharon Creech,
Root Beer Candy and Other Miracles by
Shari Green, House Arrest by K. A.
Holt, The Magic of Melwick Orchard by
Caprara Rebecca, and Paper Hearts by
Meg Wiviott.

Let’s chat! Have you read any novels in verse yet? If you
have, what are some of the ones you’d consider the best? On a scale of boring
clichés to fantastic themes, how much do you enjoy poetry?